Have you ever thought of yourself as being a suspicious person? Is there some annoying little voice deep inside your head, nagging you and letting you question inappropriately or simply redundantly?

Doubting something is our natural warning system. If we trust on our guts – given that they work quite reliably – they should warn us of running blindly down the road to ruin. If they don’t work reliably – well, then we are either too naïve, or too suspicious. Both can be extremely exhausting, for ourselves and people that have to deal with us.

But even if you think you can rely on your gut feeling – when you start brooding over something, you might turn into a hypersensitive and very suspicious maniac. Previous own experiences, experiences our friends made that we observed, and the daily shit we read on the internet, fine-tune our instincts to becoming more sensitive towards things that matter to us. Combined with a fertile imagination, we can end up deadly fanatic.

I don’t wanna jinx anything or make life more complicated than it already is – but for a little fun, just think about the numerous situations in which you trust other people on a daily basis (usually strangers). Driving around in your car for instance, you have to trust each and everyone of the other drivers to stick to the rules: They stay in their lane, you stay in yours. Everyone stops when there’s a red light. Hell would break lose if everyone suddenly decided to disregard traffic lights, or worse, simply do the opposite of what they are expected to do.

Taking a bike or going by walk lets you see the difficulties arising when people act different than they are expected to. Take Finland, for example: In a country with a population not noteworthy bigger than that of Berlin, but spread over almost the same area as whole Germany, people are not quite used to interacting with others on a tight space. So you think if you just bike on the right side of the road/pavement, you are fine? You think if you walk at your pace, artistically juggling yourself around people, you will make it without accidents to your destination? Well, far wrong! Expect the unexpected – like other bikers suddenly overtaking you from the right, or ending up on your lane when you come around a corner, or other pedestrians stopping for a very important thought popping up, out of a sudden, without any previous warning sign, and right in front of your nose! Now if you imagined these happenings in the road traffic, just picture the outcome…

Which way do you choose? Safe or risky?

But back to the topic – what is this trusting and being suspicious actually all about? It warns us – but does it prepare us? Even if you anticipate something bad to happen, you can never know when it might happen, and how to react in that situation. You basically have two options – either you stay at home, or you go out there, into the traffic, trust people, and try to deal with it if they abuse your trust. Not in any situation you may keep this wrong-way driver from going there in the first place – you can only try to get out of their way when exposed.

To conclude, being overly suspicious is exhausting. Even if you’re too naïve you might still be better off. You cannot control the actions of others, and eventually, they do whatever they want anyways. So just go out there and have a little faith in others doing the right thing and staying in the right lane, and enjoy the ride.